D-E: Davis through Drake

See below for annotated biographies of Radical Republicans. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.

DAVIS, Edmund Jackson (October 2, 1827-February 7, 1883), governor of Texas, radical republican.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, pp. 112-113:

DAVIS, EDMUND JACKSON (October 2, 1827-February 7, 1883), governor of Texas, was born in St. Augustine, Florida, but moved to Texas with his widowed mother in 1838, settling at Galveston. He studied law in Corpus Christi and practised his profession in Brownsville, Laredo, and Corpus Christi. He was deputy collector of customs under the Fillmore administration, was elected district attorney for the Rio Grande Valley district in 1853, and became judge of that district in 1854, serving until 1861. Alienated from the Confederate cause by his defeat in the race for delegate to the Secession Convention, he organized a regiment of Texas Unionists in Mexico. While recruiting near Matamoras he was captured by Confederates and narrowly escaped hanging. He led the unsuccessful Union attack on Laredo in 1864, but his regiment spent most of the war period in Louisiana. Davis was made a brigadier-general after the battle of Mansfield. He declined General Sheridan's appointment as chief justice of the Texas st ate supreme court in 1865.

As a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1866 and as president of the Reconstruction convention of 1868-69 he advocated disfranchisement of ex-Confederates, unrestricted negro suffrage, and other radical measures of his party; in the latter convention he advocated dividing Texas into three states. In an election held by the military commander in 1869 he was elected governor of Texas over A. J. Hamilton, Democrat and Union army officer. His majority was less than one thousand, but he was the state's dictator for the next four years. He supported measures which, passed by the subservient Radical legislature, gave unusual power into the hands of the governor and alienated all but his own political partisans. The governor was empowered to appoint more than eight thousand state, county, and local officials, leaving a very small percentage of the state's employees to be elected by the voters.

The verdict of the people was that almost all of the Davis appointees were either incapable or dishonest. Although Richard Coke [q.v.] polled a majority of more than 40,000 in the election for governor in 1873, Davis declared the election law unconstitutional and refused to give up his office. He appealed to President Grant to order troops to Austin to sustain him in his claim. While Governor Coke and the Democratic legislature organized the new administration on the second floor of the Capitol, Davis and the old legislature continued to maintain their positions on the fir st floor, guarded by a company of negro troops. After several clays of dual government, during which time an armed clash was constantly expected, President Grant wired Davis that he declined to intervene, and Davis retired from office.

He continued to make his home in Austin, practised law, and was the Republican leader in the state until his death. He ran for governor against O. M. Roberts in 1880, but was defeated by a hundred thousand votes. He was warmly supported by a strong faction for a place in the cabinet of President Arthur, and was defeated for Congress in the Austin district in 1882. Even his most bitter opponents believed that he was personally honest (Dallas Herald, February 8, 1883). He was the " ablest and most influential" Texas Republican of the Reconstruction period, and had the power of a czar within his own party. His domestic and social life was above reproach, and he was a man of unusual culture and refinement. At Corpus Christi in 1858 he had married Anne Britton, daughter of Maj. Forbes Britton, Texas officer in the Mexican War. Although her twin brother and other relatives were Confederates and Democrats, Mrs. Davis remained loyal to her husband throughout the period of the war and Reconstruction.

[Newspaper files in the Univ. of Texas Lib.; Senate and House Journals, 1866-74; Constitutional Convention Journals, 1866, 1869, and 1875; Executive Correspondence, Davis, File Boxes 206-20, in Secretary of State's office, Austin, Texas; S. S. McKay, "Texas During the E. J. Davis Regime" (MS., Austin, 1919); S. S. McKay, Making the Texas Constitution of 1876 (1924); C. W. Ramsdell, Reconstruction in Texas (1910); F. W. John son. A History of Texas and Texans (1914), I, 563; Daily Statesman (Austin), and Galveston News, of February 8, 1883; Weekly Democrat Statesman (Austin), February 15, 1883. Date of birth from tombstone erected by Davis's brother in the State Cemetery, Austin.]

S. S. M.



DAVIS, Henry Winter, 1817-1865, statesman, lawyer.  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, 3rd District of Maryland, 1854, 1856, 1858, 1863-1865.  Anti-slavery activist in Congress.  Supported enlistment of African Americans in Union Army.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 97-98; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, p. 119; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 6, p. 198; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe) He published a book entitled the “War of Ormuzd and Ahriman in the Nineteenth Century” (Baltimore, 1853). His collected speeches, together with a eulogy by his colleague, John A. J. Cresswell, were published in New York in 1867.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 3, Pt. 1, p. 119:

DAVIS, HENRY WINTER (August 16, 1817- December 30, 1865), politician, statesman, was the son of Reverend Henry Lyon Davis, president of St. John's College (Maryland), an ardent Federalist and Episcopalian, and Jane (Brown) Winter, a cultured woman with aristocratic connections in the town of Annapolis. During the campaign of 1828 Davis's father was removed from his position by the partisans of Jackson on the board of trustees of the college, and set adrift under circumstances which greatly influenced the career of Henry Winter Davis. After a strenuous course at Kenyon College (Ohio), young Davis procured, after much delay and difficulty, the meager funds necessary to enable him to study law at the University of Virginia. He left the University in June 1840 with some knowledge of law, mainly Coke on Littleton, and began his career at Alexandria, Virginia, a handsome man of twenty-three, six feet tall, and of aristocratic bearing and manner. Here he quickly won an enviable reputation, obtained a good income from his profession, and on October 30, 1845, married Constance C. Gardiner, daughter of a prominent citizen of the town. After her death, he married, on January 26, 1857, Nancy Morris of Baltimore, whither he had moved in 1849. Attaching himself to the Whig party, Davis appeared on the platform as a speaker with Robert Winthrop and Horace Greeley in the unhappy campaign of General Winfield Scott for the presidency in 1852. In 1855 he was chosen to a seat in Congress where he immediately took a prominent place among the leaders of the Know-Nothing party. The hot disputes about Kansas left him unmoved, nor did the ardent campaign of 1856 budge him from his steady conservatism. He supported Fillmore, and endeavored to hold his neutral position from 1856 to 1860. But the decline of the Know-Nothing party and the break between Douglas and Buchanan compelled him to take sides. On the last clay of January 1860, after a deadlock of seven weeks, he cast his vote for William Pennington, Republican candidate for speaker. This enabled the new party to organize the House and to prepare more effectively for the presidential campaign already opened. The decision made Davis a national character, but the legislature of Maryland repudiated his action by a vote of 62 to 1. From that clay to his death every public act of Davis was a matter of immediate concern to the country. He was for a moment candidate for the Republican nomination for the vice-presidency, and thought of himself from that time forward as a suitable candidate for the presidency. He was guided by an overweening ambition, but his abilities as a statesman and an orator were acknowledged to be extraordinary. In his district he was both hated and loved beyond all other public men and his campaigns for reelection were violent and bloody. Notwithstanding his vote for the Republicans in January 1860, he was the guiding spirit of the Bell and Everett party in Maryland; and he procured the nomination of Thomas H. Hicks [q.v.], Unionist, for governor. His purpose was not to defeat the Republican party in Maryland, but the regular Democrats, with Breckinridge as their candidate. Bell and Everett won; Hicks likewise was successful.

Davis, serving the balance of his term in the House of Representatives during the critical winter of 1860-61, keenly desired to sit in the new cabinet. But Montgomery Blair, a member of perhaps the most influential family in the country and the leader of a forlorn hope of Republicans in Maryland, was chosen. Davis was alone and without a party, for the Union party was rapidly disintegrating. On February 7, when the Confederacy was just raising its head in Montgomery and the leading Republicans of the North were acquiescing in the secession movement, Davis in one of the important speeches of his life asserted that in Maryland they did not recognize the right of secession and that they would not be dragged from the Union (Congressional Globe, Appendix, 36 Congress, 2 Session). But Governor Hicks and the people of Maryland did recognize the right of Southerners to secede and they seemed about to take legislative action in that direction. Davis said later that but for his activity Lincoln would have been inaugurated in some Pennsylvania village. He wrote a public letter to the New York Tribune urging that th e Federal forts in Maryland be placed in the hands of Union men. Then he simply announced himself as a candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives. It was the 15th of April. Four days later the 6th Massachusetts Regiment was attacked in Baltimore. One of the most spectacular and bitter of political contests ensued, with Davis everywhere the militant leader of the Unionists. On June 13 his opponent, Henry May, a Southern sympathizer, was elected by a vote of 8,335 to 6,287.

It was a decisive defeat, but Davis became even better known to the country, traveled widely, and spoke often for the Union. However, either his chagrin at the presence of Montgomery Blair in Lincoln's cabinet or the President's open violation of many of the sacred traditions of the country led him into opposition. He could hardly contain himself when he thought of the procedure in the many courts martial of the day, or of the thousands of men in prison without proved offense. To him the habeas corpus was sacred beyond a question. Before a very hostile Brooklyn audience, early in November, he bitterly arraigned the President and all about him. There are few instances of a speaker's attaining such complete mastery over his audience as Davis did on that occasion. Nor did he-ever cease to oppose most of the President's policies. He was not arrested or imprisoned, however, and in the hotly contested election of 1863 he was returned to the House, where he was at once made chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. He then became and remained a close friend and ally of Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means. It was at the moment when Lincoln sent to Congress his program of reconstruction, known as the Louisiana Plan. Davis ranged himself at once on the side of the opposition, attacking upon every possible occasion the " usurpations" of the President, and ridiculing unmercifully the foreign policy of Seward, the management of the navy by Gideon Welles, the conduct of General Frank P. Blair as an army commander, and the unrelenting campaign of Montgomery Blair against himself in Maryland. In a little while the great majority of the House hung upon his words and followed him implicitly. He was more the master of that body than Thaddeus Stevens himself.

The most important of Davis's campaigns in the House of Representatives began early il1 the session and culminated in a victory over the President in spite of all that Seward, Welles, and the Blairs could do. Instead of reporting a reconstruction bill such as Lincoln suggested, Davis wrote and substituted a measure of his own. The President would leave the reconstructed states to abolish slavery themselves; Davis would compel immediate emancipation. The President would allow ten per cent of the voters to set up a new state government; Davis would require a majority. The President would proscribe only a few of the leading Confederates; Davis would proscribe a vast number. The President said nothing about repudiating Southern debts; Davis would compel repudiation of all Southern war debts, state and Confederate. His was a policy of "thorough," like that of the Cromwellians in England. Davis's principal speech in support of his drastic plan was made on March 22, 1864, when the supporters of the President and the rising radical opposition were engaged in the bitterest warfare. He denied the right of the President to reconstruct a state and considered the Emancipation Proclamation as invalid until approved by Congress. He claimed all power for Congress and wished so to reconstruct the Southern states, when they were completely beaten and utterly helpless, that no court could ever undo the work. The Davis bill passed the House and the Senate by large majorities. When at last, after his renomination and the adjournment of Congress, Lincoln pocket vetoed the measure, Davis was beside himself with rage. He took the extreme risk of a violent attack upon the nominee of his party at a moment when' few thoughtful men had any real hope of complete success in the war. In July, conferences of leading Republicans were held in New York. Davis took part. In the spirit of these troubled men, Davis wrote the famous Wade-Davis manifesto which appeared in the leading papers on August 8, 1864. In this document he reviewed the history of the congressional plan of reconstruction and ridiculed the President's plan in unmerciful language (Speeches and Addresses of Henry Winter Davis, pp. 415-426).

It is said that Davis never entered the White House during Lincoln's incumbency and that this manifesto brought the relations of the two men, as well as of the opposing groups in the Republican party, to the necessity of some understanding. The presidential election was pending and the people of the North had plainly lost heart. Davis was in Baltimore waging his campaign for reelection, while Seward, Weed, Welles, and the rest were fighting in Washington and elsewhere for the success of their chief. On July 1, Chase resigned and gave up his open fight on the President. On September 4, the news of victory at Atlanta reached Washington. Early in September, Montgomery Blair ceased his war upon Davis and offered his resignation. Before the end of September, Davis called at the White House and henceforth made speeches on behalf of the President. Lincoln was reelected and Chase took his seat as chief justice, but the ambitious chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations was defeated in his district.

When Congress met, however, in December 1864, Davis, now a "lame duck," was the most popular man in it. He fought through the short session, saw Andrew Johnson inaugurated with more than wonted pleasure, and, after the death of Lincoln, went to Chicago to make another of his great speeches: He attacked Johnson as he had attacked Lincoln, and outlined once more the program of congressional reconstruction which was indorsed by Charles Sumner at Worcester on September 14 and readopted by Congress the next year. Davis, still only forty-eight years old, looked forward to the day when he might sit in the coveted White House, mean while impeaching Andrew Johnson, as he must have sought the impeachment of Lincoln if the latter had lived. A private citizen of extraordinary prestige, he returned to Washington in December 1865, and with his mere presence at the door of the House of Representatives broke up the session. Exposed to inclement weather during the holidays, he took cold. This developed into pneumonia and on December 30 he died.

[There has never been an adequate study of Davis's career, though Bernard C. Steiner, The Life of Henry Winter Davis (1916), offers a brief review of the main facts and incidents. J. A. J. Creswell's sketch of Davis's life is published as an introduction to The Speeches and Addresses Delivered in the Congress of the U.S. and on Several Public Occasions, by Henry Winter Davis (1867). Gideon Welles and Adam Gurowski make frequent mention of him in their diaries.]

W.E.D.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 97-98:

DAVIS, Henry Winter, statesman, born in Annapolis, Maryland, 16 August, 1817; died in Baltimore, 30 December, 1865. His father, Reverend Henry Lyon Davis, of the Protestant Episcopal church, was the president of St. John's college, at Annapolis, and rector of St. Ann's parish. He lost both offices on account of his Federal politics, and removed to Wilmington, Delaware, leaving his son with Elizabeth Brown Winter, an aunt, who possessed a noble character, and was rigid in her system of training children. The boy afterward went to Wilmington, and was instructed under his father's supervision. In l827 the family returned to Maryland and settled in Anne Arundel county. Here Henry Winter became much attached to field-sports, and gave little promise of scholarly attainments. He roamed about the country, always attended by one of his father's slaves, with an old fowling-piece upon his shoulder, burning much powder and returning with a small amount of game. The insight into slavery that he thus gained affected him strongly. He said, in after years: “My familiar association with the slaves, while a boy, gave me great insight into their feelings and views. They spoke with freedom before a boy what they would have repressed before a man. They were far from indifferent to their condition; they felt wronged, and sighed for freedom. They were attached to my father, and loved me, yet they habitually spoke of the day when God would deliver them.” He was educated in Alexandria, and at Kenyon college, where he was graduated in 1837. His father died in that year, leaving a few slaves to be divided between himself and his sister, but he would not allow them to be sold, although he might have pursued his studies with ease and comfort. Rather than do this he obtained a tutorship, and, notwithstanding these arduous tasks, read the course of law in the University of Virginia, which he entered in 1839. The expenses of his legal studies were defrayed with the proceeds of some land that his aunt had sold for the purpose. He began practice in Alexandria, Virginia, but first attained celebrity in the Episcopal convention of Maryland by his defence of Dr. H. V. D. Johns against the accusation of Bishop Whittingham for having violated the canon of the Episcopal church in consenting to officiate in the Methodist Episcopal church. In 1850 he removed to Baltimore, where he held a high social and professional position. He was a prominent whig, and known as the brilliant orator and controversialist of the Scott canvass in 1852. He was elected a member of congress for the 3d district of Maryland (part of Baltimore) in 1854, and re-elected in 1856, serving on the committee of ways and means. After the dissolution of the whig party he joined the American or Know-nothing party. He was re-elected to congress in 1858, and in 1859 voted for Mr. Pennington, the republican candidate for speaker, thus drawing upon himself much abuse and reproach. The legislature of Maryland “decorated him with its censure,” as he expressed it on the floor of the house; but he declared to his constituents that, if they would not allow their representative to exercise his private judgment as to what were the best interests of the state, “You may send a slave to congress, but you can not send me.” After the attack on the 6th Massachusetts regiment in Baltimore in 1861, Mr. Davis published a card announcing himself as an “unconditional union” candidate for congress, and conducted his canvass almost alone amid a storm of reproach and abuse, being defeated, but receiving about 6,000 votes. When Mr. Lincoln was nominated in 1860, Mr. Davis was offered the nomination for vice-president, but declined it; and when the question of his appointment to the cabinet was agitated, he urged the selection of John A. Gilmer in his stead. He was again in congress in 1863-'5, and served as chairman of the committee on foreign affairs. Although representing a slave state, Mr. Davis was conspicuous for unswerving fidelity to the Union and advocacy of emancipation. He heartily supported the administration, but deprecated the assumption of extraordinary powers by the executive, and denounced congress as cowardly for not authorizing by statute what it expected that department to do. He early favored the enlistment of negroes in the army, and said, “The best deed of emancipation is a musket on the shoulder.” In the summer of 1865 he made a speech in Chicago in favor of negro suffrage. Mr. Davis was denounced by politicians as impractical. He used to say that he who compromised a moral principle was a scoundrel, but that he who would not compromise a political measure was a fool. Mr. Davis possessed an unusually fine library, and was gifted with a good memory and a brilliant mind, which was united with many personal advantages. Inheriting force and scholarship from his father, he had received also a share of his mother's milder qualities, which won many friends, although, to the public, he seemed stern and dictatorial. At his death congress set apart a day for the commemoration of his public services, an honor never before paid to an ex-member of congress. He published a book entitled the “War of Ormuzd and Ahriman in the Nineteenth Century” (Baltimore, 1853). His collected speeches, together with a eulogy by his colleague, John A. J. Cresswell, were published in New York in 1867. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 97-98.



DAVIS, Edmund J.



DOUGLASS, Frederick, 1817-1895, African American, escaped slave, author, diplomat, orator, newspaper publisher, radical abolitionist leader.  Published The North Star abolitionist newspaper with Martin Delany.  Wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas: An American Slave, in 1845.  Also wrote My Bondage, My Freedom, 1855.  Manager, American Anti-Slavery Society, 1848-1853. 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 331-333; Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960; Foner, 1964; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970; McFeely, 1991;  Quarles, 1948; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 264-265; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 217; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 251-254; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 6, p. 816; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume II. New York: James T. White, 1892, pp. 309-310; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 4, p. 67).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936;  Volume 3 pt. 1 pp. 406-407:

DOUGLASS, FREDERICK (February 1817?--February 20, 1895), abolitionist, orator, journalist, was named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but assumed the name of Douglass after his escape from slavery. He was born at Tuckahoe near Easton, Talbot County, Maryland, the son of an unknown white father and Harriet Bailey, a slave who had also some Indian blood. As a child he experienced neglect and cruelty, indulgence and hard work; but particularly the tyranny and circumscription of an ambitious human being who was legally classed as real estate. He turned at last upon his cruelest master, and by fighting back for the first time, realize d that resistance paid even in slavery. He was sent to Baltimore as a house servant and learned to read and write with the assistance of his mistress. Soon he conceived the possibility of freedom. The settlement of his dead master's estate sent him back to the country as a field hand. He conspired with a half dozen of his fellows to escape but their plan was betrayed and he was thrown into jail. His master's forbearance secured his return to Baltimore, where he learned the trade of a ship's calker and eventually was permitted to hire his own time. A second attempt to escape, September 3, 1838, was entirely successful. He went to New York City; married Anna Murray, a free colored woman whom he had met in Baltimore, and together they went to New Bedford, where he became a common laborer.

Suddenly a career opened. He had read Garrison's Liberator, and in 1841 he attended a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Nantucket. An abolitionist who had heard him speak to his colored friends asked him to address the convention. He did so with hesitation and stammering, but with extraordinary effect. Much to his own surprise, he was immediately employed as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He took part in the Rhode Island campaign against the new constitution which proposed the disfranchisement of the blacks; and he became the central figure in the famous "One Hundred Conventions" of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. It was a baptism of fire and brought out the full stature of the man. He was mobbed and mocked, beaten, compelled to ride in "Jim Crow" cars, and refused accommodations; but he carried the programme through to the bitter end. 

Physically, Douglass was a commanding person, over six feet in height, with brown skin, frizzly hair, leonine head, strong constitution, and a fine voice. Persons who had heard him on the platform began to doubt his story. They questioned if this man who spoke good English and bore himself with independent self-assertion could ever have been a slave. Thereupon he wrote his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass which Wendell Phillips advised him to burn. It was a daring recital of facts and Phillips feared that it might lead to his reenslavement. Douglass published the little book in 1845, however, and then, to avoid possible consequences, visited Great Britain and Ireland. Here he remained two years, meeting nearly all of the English Liberals. For the first time in his life he was treated as a man and an equal. The resultant effect upon his character was tremendous. He began to conceive emancipation not simply as physical freedom; but as social equality and economic and spiritual opportunity. He returned to the United States in 1847 with money to buy his freedom and to establish a newspaper for his race. Differences immediately arose with his white' abolitionist friends. Garrison did not believe such a journal was needed and others, even more radical, thought that the very buying of his freedom was condoning slavery. Differences too arose as to political procedure in the abolition campaign. In all these matters, however, Douglass was eminently practical. With all his intense feeling and his reasons for greater depth of feeling than any white abolitionist, he had a clear head and a steady hand. He allowed his freedom to be bought from his former master; he established the North Star and issued it for seventeen years. He lectured, supported woman suffrage, took part in politics, endeavored to help Harriet Beecher Stowe establish an industrial school for colored youth, and counseled with John Brown. When Brown was arrested, the Governor of Virginia tried to apprehend Douglass as a conspirator. Douglass hastily fled to Canada and for six months again lectured in England and Scotland.

With the Civil War came his great opportunity. He thundered against slavery as its real cause; he offered black men as soldiers and pleaded with black men to give their services. He assisted in recruiting the celebrated 54th and 55th Massachusetts colored regiments, giving his own sons as first recruits. Lincoln called him into conference and during Reconstruction, Douglass agitated in support of suffrage and civil rights for the freedmen. His last years were spent in ease and honor. He was successively secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, marshal and recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia, and finally United States minister to Haiti. His second marriage, in 1884, to Helen Pitts, a white woman, brought a flurry of criticism, but he laughingly remarked that he was quite impartial-his first wife "was the color of my mother, and the second, the color of my father." He was active to the very close of his career, having attended a woman-suffrage convention on the day of his death.

 [The chief sources of information about Frederick Douglass are his autobiographies: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), republished in England and translated into French and German; My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); Life and Times of Frederi.ck Douglass (1881). The best biographies are: F. M. Holland, Frederick Douglass, the Colored Orator (1891); C. W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass (1899); Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (1907). There are numerous references in W. P. and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879 (4 volumes, 1885-89), and throughout the literature of the abolition controversy. Many of Douglass's speeches have been published.]

W. E. B. D.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, p. 217:

DOUGLASS, Frederick, orator, born in Tuckahoe, near Easton, Talbot county, Maryland, in February, 1817. His mother was a negro slave, and his father a white man. He was a slave on the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd, until at the age of ten he was sent to Baltimore to live with a relative of his master. He learned to read and write from one of his master's relatives, to whom he was lent when about nine years of age. His master allowed him later to hire his own time for three dollars a week, and he was employed in a ship-yard, and, in accordance with a resolution long entertained, fled from Baltimore and from slavery, 3 September, 1838. He made his way to New York, and thence to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he married and lived for two or three years, supporting himself by day-labor on the wharves and in various workshops. While there he changed his name from Lloyd to Douglass. He was aided in his efforts for self-education by William Lloyd Garrison. In the summer of 1841 he attended an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket, and made a speech, which was so well received that he was offered the agency of the Massachusetts anti-slavery society. In this capacity he travelled and lectured through the New England states for four years. Large audiences were attracted by his graphic descriptions of slavery and his eloquent appeals. In 1845 he went to Europe, and lectured on slavery to enthusiastic audiences in nearly all the large towns of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In 1846 his friends in England contributed $750 to have him manumitted in due form of law. He remained two years in Great Britain, and in 1847 began at Rochester, New York, the publication of '”Frederick Douglass's Paper,” whose title was changed to “The North Star,” a weekly journal, which he continued for some years. His supposed implication in the John Brown raid in 1859 led Governor Wise, of Virginia, to make a requisition for his arrest upon the governor of Michigan, where he then was, and in consequence of this Mr. Douglass went to England, and remained six or eight months. He then returned to Rochester, and continued the publication of his paper. When the civil war began in 1861 he urged upon President Lincoln the employment of colored troops and the proclamation of emancipation. In 1863, when permission was given to employ such troops, he assisted in enlisting men to fill colored regiments, especially the 54th and 55th Massachusetts. After the abolition of slavery he discontinued his paper and applied himself to the preparation and delivery of lectures before lyceums. In September, 1870, he became editor of the “New National Era” in Washington, which was continued by his sons, Lewis and Frederick. In 1871 he was appointed assistant secretary to the commission to Santo Domingo; and on his return President Grant appointed him one of the territorial council of the District of Columbia. In 1872 he was elected presidential elector at large for the state of New York, and was appointed to carry the electoral vote of the state to Washington. In 1876 he was appointed U. S. marshal for the District of Columbia, which office he retained till 1881, after which he became recorder of deeds in the District, from which office he was removed by President Cleveland in 1886. In the autumn of 1886 he revisited England, to inform the friends he had made as a fugitive slave of the progress of the African race in the United States, with the intention of spending the winter on the continent and the following summer in the United Kingdom. His published works are entitled “Narrative of my Experience in Slavery” (Boston, 1844); “My Bondage and my Freedom” (Rochester, 1855); and “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” (Hartford, 1881). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume II, pp. 217.

Chapter: “Position of the Colored People. - Frederick Douglass,” by Henry Wilson, in History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 1872.

While the free colored people instinctively distrusted the Colonization Society, and withheld their confidence from it, they at once and heartily accepted the abolition movement. This was especially true of the more intelligent and well-informed. Among the colored ministers there were several who, seeing its religious as well as humane bearings, rendered essential aid to the cause. A few others did something in the same direction, arousing public attention and quickening the zeal of the friends of freedom.

But in 1841 a champion arose in the person of Frederick Douglass, who was destined to play an important part in the great drama then in progress. In him not only did the colored race but manhood itself find a worthy representative and advocate; one who was a signal illustration, not only of self-culture and success under the most adverse circumstances, but of the fact that talent and genius are " color-blind," and above the accidents of complexion and birth. He, too, furnished an example of the terrible necessities of slavery, and its purpose and power to crush out the human soul; as also of the benign energies of freedom to arouse, to develop, and enlarge its highest and noblest faculties, --the one aiming, and almost succeeding in the attempt, to make him a mere mindless and purposeless chattel; the other actually and indissolubly linking his name and labors with the antislavery cause, both in this country and in Europe. As few of the world's great men have ever had so checkered and diversified a career, so it may be at least plausibly claimed that no man represents in himself more conflicting ideas and interests. His life is in itself an epic which finds few to equal it in the realms of either romance or reality.

Frederick Douglass was born on the Eastern Shore, Maryland, about the year 1817. According to the necessities of slavery and the usual practice of slave-masters, he was taken from his mother when an infant, consequently deprived of even the rude care which maternal instinct might have prompted, and placed under the guardianship of his grandmother, with whom he lived until he was seven years of age. At the age of ten he was sent to Baltimore, to be the companion and protector of the son of a young married couple, who, in consequence of general refinement of character and his proposed relation to their darling boy, treated him, at first, kindly. This change Mr. Douglass ever regarded as a providential interposition, as the turning-point where his pathway, leaving the descending grade of slave life, entered upon that which led him in that widely divergent and upward direction it has since pursued. Leaving the rude experience of the plantation, with the barren and desert-like surroundings of the Eastern Shore, for the bustle and necessary companionship of the city, an opportunity of learning to read was afforded him, which he most sedulously and successfully, though surreptitiously, improved. But the friendliness which his master and mistress had so generously extended to him as an ignorant slave, they felt obliged, by the necessities of the system, to withhold from him now that he could read, and had learned to question the rightfulness of slavery and to chafe under its chains.

Returned to the Eastern Shore, he encountered the rigors of plantation life, greatly increased by the drunken caprices of an intemperate master, and doubtless aggravated by his own impatient and contumacious rebellings under such slave-holding restraint. This, however, was but a prelude to an experience graver and still more tragic. Despairing of controlling young Douglass himself, his owner placed him - as men place their unbroken colts under the care of horse-trainers in the hands of a professed negro-breaker, known through the region as a cruel and merciless man, who had, not only gained that reputation, but found it necessary or for his interest to maintain it. Concerning this change Mr. Douglass remarks, after referring to the " comparative tenderness " with which he had been treated at Baltimore: " I was now about to sound profounder depths in slave life. The rigors of a field less tolerable than the field of battle were before me." That his apprehensions were not groundless these extracts, taken from his autobiography, abundantly show: “I had not been in his possession three whole days before he subjected me to a most brutal chastisement. Under his heavy blows blood flowed freely; the wales were left on my back as large as my little finger. The sores on my back from this whipping continued for weeks." "I remained with Mr. Corey one year, cannot say I lived with him, and during the first six months that I was there I was whipped either with sticks or cowskins every week. Aching bones and a sore back were my constant companions. Frequently as the lash was used, however, Mr. Corey thought less of it, as a means of breaking down my spirit, than of hard and long-continued labor. He worked me steadily up to the point of my powers of endurance. From the dawn of day in the morning till the darkness was complete in the evening, I was kept at hard work in the field or the woods."
He gave accounts of individual cases of brutal chastisement which were revolting almost beyond conception; while his concise description of himself" as a living embodiment of mental and physical wretchedness” seems but a natural result. "A few months of discipline," he says," tamed me. Mr. Corey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed; my intellect languished; the disposition to read departed; the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute." 

Having completed his year with Corey, he was hired out to another and more humane master. But the iron of slavery rankled in his soul, and he could not endure its galling restraints, however softened by kindness. After long rumination upon the subject, and conferences with four or five of his companions in bondage, he proposed and planned an attempt to escape. Betrayed, however, by a confederate, they were prevented from carrying their attempt into execution, and were arrested and imprisoned. Instead of being “sold South"-- that dreaded alternative of success, which held back thousands from making the attempt --he was sent again to Baltimore. Being nearly murdered by the carpenters of a ship-yard, because of their jealousy of slave competition with white labor,--a crime for which no indictment could be found, though sought, because no white witnesses would testify against his brutal assailants, --he was sent to another yard to learn the trade of a calker. Becoming an expert workman, he was permitted to make his own contracts, returning his week's wages every Saturday night to his master. At the same time --which was of more importance to him, he was permitted to associate with some free colored men, who had formed a kind of lyceum for their mutual improvement, and by means of which he was enabled to increase materially his knowledge and mental culture. All of this, however, did but increase his sense of the essential injustice of slavery, and make him more restive under its galling chains. Accordingly he made his plans, now successful, and on the third day of September, 1838, he says, “I bade farewell to the city of Baltimore, and to that slavery which had been my abhorrence from childhood." For prudential reasons the particulars of his mode of escape were withheld from the public knowledge, as they were of little comparative importance; while, had they been known then, they might have compromised some and hedged up the way of escape of others. Landing in New York, a homeless, penniless, and friendless fugitive, he thus describes his feelings: " In the midst of thousands of my fellow-men, and yet a perfect stranger! In the midst of human brothers, and yet more fearful of them than of hungry wolves! I was without home, without friends, without work, without money, and without any definite knowledge of which way to go or where to look for succor." In the midst of his perplexities he met a sailor, whose seeming frankness and honesty won, as they deserved, his confidence. He introduced him to David Ruggles, chairman of the Vigilance Committee, a colored gentleman of much intelligence, energy, and worth, who by his position and executive ability did much for his people. This gentleman advised him to go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, assisted him in reaching that city, and introduced him to trustworthy friends there. Here he was employed, mostly as a day laborer on the wharves, encountering the same shameful and unmanly jealousy of colored competition that had nearly cost him his life at Baltimore, and which would not allow him to work at his trade as calker by the side of white men. Being a professing Christian, he was interested in religious meetings, where he was accustomed to pray and exhort, a practice which probably had something to do with his wonderful subsequent success as a public speaker.

The first demonstration of his eloquence which attracted public attention was at a meeting mainly of colored people, in which were specially considered the claims of the Colonization Society. Here began to be emitted specimens of that fiery eloquence from his capacious soul, burning with the indignant and unfading memories of the wrongs, outrages, and the deep injustice which slavery had inflicted on him, and which it was now inflicting upon his brethren in bonds. Of course, the few white Abolitionists of New Bedford were not long in finding out the young fugitive, appreciating his gifts and promise of usefulness, and in devising ways of extending his range of effort for their unpopular cause. Attending an antislavery convention at Nantucket, he was persuaded to address the meeting. His speech here seems to have been singularly eloquent and effective. Among those present was Mr. Garrison, who bore his testimony, both then and afterward, to "the extraordinary emotion it exerted on his own mind, and to the powerful impression it exerted upon a crowded auditory." He declared, too, that “Patrick Henry had never made a more eloquent speech in the cause of liberty than the one they had just listened to from the lips of that hunted fugitive." Nathaniel P. Rogers, editor of the "Herald of Freedom," thus characterized a speech made by him the same year. After speaking of his “commanding figure and heroic port," his head, that “would strike a phrenologist amid a sea of them in Exeter Hall," he adds: "As a speaker he has few equals. It is not declamation, but oratory, power of debate. . . He has wit, argument, sarcasm, pathos, all that first-rate men show in their master efforts."

This language, especially that of Mr. Garrison, seems extravagant, and the laudation excessive; nor could it be accepted as a general and critical estimate of Mr. Douglass as an orator, great as his powers confessedly were and are. His Nantucket speech was unquestionably one of those rare bursts of eloquence, little less than inspiration itself, which are sometimes vouchsafed to a man in his happiest moods; when the speaker seems to rise above himself and to take his audience with him. Besides, there was certainly much in the circumstances and surroundings of that meeting to impress the minds and stir the sensibilities of such an assembly. On that isle of the sea, at some distance from the mainland, one could easily imagine a picture of the nation overshadowed by the dark cloud of slavery, and prostrate beneath a despotism pressing alike on the slaves at the South and on their advocates at the North. Indeed, the latter had just passed through a baptism of fire and blood, during those fearful years of mobs and martyrdom, which had measurably ceased, but had been succeeded by what the earnest Abolitionist deprecated more than violence, and that was the general apathy which then reigned.

In the conflict for freedom of speech and the right of free discussion Abolitionists had achieved a victory. What they had contended for had, at length, been conceded; at least, the principle was no longer contested. They had conquered a peace; but their opponents were determined it should be the peace of the grave. For the wordy warfare of discussion and the brutal violence of lynch laws they would substitute the policy of neglect. To let them severely alone, to belittle their cause, to pass them by with a supercilious sneer, and to frown contemptuously upon their attempts to gain a hearing, became at that time the tactics of the enemies against the advocates of human rights. Of course, what were termed antislavery measures had lost much of their zest and potency; meetings became less numerously attended, and, consequently, less frequent; organizations, losing their interest and effectiveness, began to die out. Something was necessary to revive and reanimate the drooping spirits and the languid movements of the cause and its friends. It was then, at this opportune moment, while they were thus enveloped in the chill and shade of this most uncomfortable and unsatisfactory state of affairs, the young fugitive appeared upon the stage. He seemed like a messenger from the dark land of slavery itself; as if in his person his race had found a fitting advocate; as if through his lips their long pent up wrongs and wishes had found a voice. No wonder that Nantucket meeting was greatly moved. It would not be strange if the words of description and comment of those present and in full sympathy with the youthful orator should be somewhat extravagant.

The Massachusetts Antislavery Society at once made overtures to Mr. Douglass, and he became one of its accredited agents. For this new field of labor, which he reluctantly and hesitatingly entered, and for which he modestly said he “had no preparation," the event proved that he was admirably fitted. In addition to that inborn genius and those natural gifts of oratory with which he was so generously endowed, he had the long and terrible lessons which slavery had burned into his soul. The knowledge, too, which he had stolen in the house of bondage, had enabled him to read the " Liberator " from week to week, as he was engaged in his hard and humble labors on the wharves of New Bedford, and thus to become acquainted with the new thoughts and reasonings of others. Doubtless many things which had long lain in his own mind formless and vague he found there more clearly defined and more logically expressed; while the fierceness and force of its utterances tallied only too well with the all-consuming zeal of his own soul. Thus fitted and commissioned he entered upon the great work of his life. Though distrustful of his abilities, no knight-errant ever sallied forth with higher resolve, or bore himself with more heroic courage. With whatever diffidence he undertook the proposed service, there was no lack of earnestness and devotion. Nor was his range a limited one. Fitted by his talents to move thousands on the platform, he was prepared by his early experience to be equally persuasive in a little meeting in a country school-house. In hall or church or grove he was alike effective. He could make himself at home in the parlors of the great or by the firesides of the humble: He could ride in the public conveyances from State to State, or tramp on foot from neighborhood to neighborhood. Fertile in expedients and patient in endeavor, he was not easily balked or driven from his purpose. In the midst of the prejudices of caste, hardly less strong and cruel in Massachusetts than in Maryland, he never permitted these, however painful, to divert him from his purpose. If he could not ride inside the stage, he would ride outside; if he could not ride in the first-class car, he rode in the second class; if he could not occupy the cabin of the steamer, he went into the steerage; but to these insults to his manhood he generally interposed his earnest protest, and often only yielded to superior force.

The character, culture, and eloquence displayed by his addresses provoked the insinuation that he was an impostor, and that he had never been a slave. To silence this imputation, he prepared and published, in the spring of 1845, an autobiography, which was widely circulated. As in it he gave the names of persons, places, and' dates, by which his claims and statements could be verified, it was soon known in Maryland, and he and his friends were given to understand that efforts would be made for his recapture. To place himself out of the reach of his pursuers, and, at the same time, help forward his great work, it was proposed that he should visit England. He was very kindly received there, and visited nearly all the large towns and cities of the kingdom. In a lecture in Finsbury's Chapel, in London, to an audience of three thousand, he thus answered the question why he did not confine his labors to the United States.

“My first answer is, because slavery is the common enemy of mankind, and that all mankind should be made acquainted with its abominable character. My second answer is, that the slave is a man, and as such is entitled to your sympathy as a man and a brother. He has been the prey, the common prey, of Christendom during the last three hundred years; and it is but right, just, and proper that his wrongs should be known throughout the world. I have another reason for bringing this matter before the British public, and it is this: slavery is a system of wrong so blinding to all around it, so hardening to the heart, so corrupting to the morals, so deleterious to religion, so sapping to all the principles of justice in its immediate vicinity, that the community thus connected with it lack the moral power necessary to its removal. It is a system of such gigantic evil, so strong, so overwhelming in its power, that no one nation is equal to its removal. It requires the humanity of Christianity, the morality of the civilized world, to remove it. Hence I call upon the people of Britain to look at this matter, and to exert the influence I am about to show they possess for the removal of slavery from America. I can appeal to them as strongly by their regard for the slaveholder as by 'their regard for the slave to labor in this cause. There is nothing said here against slavery that will not be recorded in the United States. I am here, also, because the slaveholders do not want me to be here. I have adopted the maxim laid down by Napoleon, never to occupy ground which the enemy would like me to occupy. The slaveholders would much rather have me, if I will denounce slavery, denounce it in the Northern States, where their friends and supporters are, who will stand by them and mob me for denouncing it…The power I exert here is something like the power that is exerted by the man at the end of the lever; my influence now is just in proportion to my distance from the United States."

In the same speech, referring to the barbarous laws of the slave code, denying that he was inveighing against the institutions of America, and asserting that his only purpose was to strip this anomalous system of all concealment, he said: " To tear off the mask from this abominable system; to expose it to the light of heaven, ay, to the heat of the sun, that it may burn and wither it out of existence, --is my object in coming to this country. I want the slaveholder surrounded as by a wall of antislavery fire, so that he may see the condemnation of himself and his system glaring down in letters of light. I want him to feel that he has no sympathy in England, Scotland, or Ireland; that he has none in Canada, none in Mexico, none among the poor wild Indians; that the voice of the civilized, ay, the savage world is against him. I would have condemnation blaze down upon him in every direction, till, stunned and overwhelmed with shame and confusion, he is compelled to let go the grasp he holds upon the persons of his victims and restore them to their long-lost rights." That, like other prominent Abolitionists of those days, he overrated the power of truth, and underestimated the power of slavery and its tenacity of life, appears in the same speech, and in this connection, when he says: “I expose slavery in this country because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death. Expose slavery, and it dies. Light is to slavery what the heat of the sun is to the root of a tree; it must die under it." Mr. Douglass had not to live long --his own career furnishing the most convincing evidence of the fact --to see that something more than “light " was necessary to destroy slavery. To expose it was not to kill it.

Of this, too, he received substantial evidence in England and Scotland, especially the latter; in England, by the refusal of the Evangelical Alliance, at the instance of the American delegation, to exclude the representatives of slaveholding churches from its platform in Scotland, where he found the Free Church not only receiving contributions for its church-building fund from such churches, but sturdily defending its propriety by the voice of its prince of scholars and clergymen, Dr. Chalmers, and by that of its hardly less honored leaders, Dr. Cunningham and Dr. Candlish. And this latter was done in spite of the earnest remonstrances of himself and others, among them that most eloquent Englishman, George Thompson, urging them not to receive that “price of blood," but to "send back the money."

Mr. Douglass remained in Great Britain nearly two years; in which time he visited England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, everywhere pressing upon the public mind the evils of slavery and the duty of laboring for its overthrow. He was cordially received, and treated with the utmost consideration. His friends, without solicitation from him, raised one hundred and fifty pounds for his manumission, and twenty-five hundred dollars with which to establish a press in this country, which he subsequently did, at Rochester, New York. His journal was first called the “North Star," and afterward "Frederick Douglass's Paper," and was ably conducted and well sustained till after the abolition of slavery. Thus by voice, pen, and personal influence has he contributed in no small measure to those manifold labors which the last thirty years have witnessed for the removal of slavery, and for the rehabilitation of his race with those rights of which it had so long been despoiled, and for the still higher purpose of preparing it for the new position it now occupies.

The main interest and importance, however, of Mr. Douglass's career, are public, rather than personal. Full of thrilling adventure, striking contrasts, brilliant passages, and undoubted usefulness, as his history was, his providential relations to some of the most marked facts and features of American history constitute the chief elements of that interest and importance which by common consent belong to it. Lifting the curtain, it revealed with startling vividness and effect the inner experience and the workings of slavery, not only upon its victims, but upon all connected with it. In it, as in a mirror, are seen how unnatural, how inhuman, and how wicked were its demands. Torn from his mother's arms in infancy, he was treated with the same disregard of his comfort and the promptings of nature as were the domestic animals of the farm-yard. As he was transferred from one master to another, everyone can see what the hazards of a “chattel personal” were, and how the kindness of one only aggravated the harshness of another. In the extreme solicitude manifested by his kind master and mistress at Baltimore that he should not learn to read, and their marked displeasure and change of treatment when he had thus learned, are seen not only the stern necessities of slavery, but how it quenched the kindlier feelings and turned to bitterness even affection itself. In the terrible struggle with Corey which he so graphically describes, when " the dark night of slavery shut in upon him," and he was "transformed to a brute," is disclosed something of the process by which manhood was dethroned, and an immortal being was transformed by something more than legal phrase into a chattel,--a thing. Had he, after his first unsuccessful attempt to escape, been " sold South," as he had reason to apprehend, and had not been sent north to Baltimore, that night would have remained unbroken, and that transformation would have been complete; and the world now knows what a light would have been extinguished and what a sacrifice would have been made. He escaped, indeed; but how many did not? Not all were so richly endowed, though none can tell how many " village Hampdens," how many " mute, inglorious Miltons" have thus been lost to letters and to man; while many have learned to sympathize with Dr. Campbell, at Finsbury's Chapel, when he exclaimed: " My blood boiled within me when I heard his address to-night, and thought that he had left behind him three millions of such men."

And sadder still when it is seen that all this was done, if not in the name of the Christian religion, in spite of it, by those professing its holy faith, -- his owner, and tormentor, Corey, both being members of the church; the latter punctilious and pretentious in his church-going, praying, and psalm singing, adding the latter generally to his daily family worship, -- and saddest of all, that, when Mr. Douglass, rescued as from the lion's den, bore a testimony which could not be gainsaid, the multitudes, though fascinated by his thrilling story and matchless eloquence, withheld from him what he earnestly sought, while only the few were willing to receive the unpopular doctrines of his Abolitionism. For twenty years he labored as few others could, addressing thousands upon thousands in the New England, Middle, and Western States; and yet till the beginning of the Rebellion he belonged to a despised minority, while the system that had so outraged him and his people still dominated the State, and  was sanctioned, if not sanctified, by the  church. In the light of such a history this mountain of national guilt assumes more towering proportions, and its base is seen to rest not upon the South alone, but upon the whole land. The crime was gigantic; and, though its expiation has already been terrible, who shall say that it has been commensurate with the crime itself?

Few have forgotten the closing utterances of Mr. Lincoln's second Inaugural concerning the war still raging, sounding as if they fell from the judgment-seat and were the words of doom itself: " Yet, if God will that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondmen's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so it still must be said, ' The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" The solemn significance .of this language is still worthy of thought, though the war has ceased and the great armies then in the field have been recalled.

Source:  Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume 1.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 499-511.



DRAKE, Charles Daniel (April 11, 1811-April 1, 1892), lawyer, jurist, United States senator, from 1861 to 1863 was unsuccessful in his demand for immediate and uncompensated emancipation.

(Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936;  Volume 3 pt. 1 pp. 425-426)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936;  Volume 3 pt. 1 pp. 425-426:

DRAKE, CHARLES DANIEL (April 11, 1811-April 1, 1892), lawyer, jurist, United States senator,
was the son of Dr. Daniel Drake [q.v.] and Harriet Sisson. The boy received cultural and literary training in his home, supplemented by academic instruction in Kentucky and Cincinnati schools. In 1827 he entered the naval academy at Annapolis where he remained for three years, resigning because of his sudden decision to study law. Arriving at St. Louis in 1834, he entered the practise of law, but was not a recognized leader of the local bar. Following a brief residence in Cincinnati, he returned in 1850 to St. Louis and shortly became active in politics. In the confused and chaotic political situation of the fifties he appeared, successively, as a Whig, a Know-Nothing, and a Democrat. He was elected as a Democrat to fill a vacancy in the legislature in 1859 and served out the term. In the critical campaign of 1860, Drake supported Douglas for president and the proslavery candidate, C. F. Jackson, for governor. He opposed secession but was not active in the spectacular events of the spring and summer of 1861 which culminated in the military defeat and political elimination of the disloyalists and assured the ultimate success of the Unionist cause. Early in the war, however, he became a leader in the attack on slavery as a legalized institution, an issue which to most Missouri leaders had been distinctly secondary to the preservation of the Union. Drake energetically led the radical or "charcoal" wing of the Unionist party, but from 1861 to 1863 was unsuccessful in his demand for immediate and uncompensated emancipation; the conservatives, led by Governor Gamble and supported by Lincoln, maintaining control of the situation. By 1863 the radical faction had become a distinct group, well organized under Drake and with a definite program, including immediate emancipation, a new constitution, and a system of drastic disfranchisement (Proceedings of the Missouri State Convention Held in Jefferson, City, June, 1863). The Radicals increased in strength and were successful in securing the authorization of a constitutional convention. In this body Drake, the vice-president, was easily the most active and conspicuous member. He was the directing force in the formation of the new constitution and the author of the sections dealing with the elective franchise (Journal of the Missouri State Convention, Held at the City of St. Louis, January 6-April10, 1865). He was peculiarly adapted to this position, for, as Carl Schurz wrote, "in politics he was inexorable ... most of the members of his party, especially in the country districts, stood much in awe of him" (Reminiscences, Volume III, 1908, p. 294). So pervasive and masterful was his influence that the adopted constitution became known as the "Drake constitution." The Radicals maintained absolute control of the state from 1865 to 1871, with Drake as their leader.

Never personally popular, he was elected to the United States Senate in 1867 as a recognition and reward for his services to his party. He took his stand with Morton, Wilson, and other extreme Radicals, in enthusiastic support of the Reconstruction measures, which permitted him to give full play to his dogmatism and intolerance. He regarded the wide-spread political and social disorder in the South as a sinister expression of the rebellious spirit in the whites and of a fixed purpose to prevent by violence the operation of the Republican party in the reconstructed states. He acted in accordance with the view that he was "a representative of radical radicalism"; and supported with obvious enthusiasm the Reconstruction legislation of 1867-70 (Congressional Globe, 40 Congress, l Session, pp. 41, 99, 109, 356). He regarded the Civil War as a social conflict, the South as a conquered province, and introduced proposals so radical that even his Republican colleagues refused to support them (Ibid., pp. 2,600, 3,920). In the trial of Johnson and in the consideration of the Fifteenth Amendment, Drake took an active part. In the meantime, his dictatorship of the Radical party in Missouri had been questioned, then successfully challenged, by the election of Carl Schurz [q.v.] to the Senate in 1869, despite Drake's bitter opposition. The factional division thus created between radicals and liberals came to a decisive test in the state campaign of 1870, where a combination of bolting liberals and Democrats triumphantly carried the state, and so amended the constitution as to end the various discriminations. With the passing of his leadership and almost of his party, Drake's position became precarious. He was unwilling and unable to adjust himself to the changed conditions, and realized that the Democrats would shortly regain control of Missouri. He accepted, therefore, from Grant in December 1870 the appointment as chief justice of the United States Court of Claims, and announced his definite withdrawal from politics. He served with distinction until his retirement in 1885. During his latter years Drake abandoned many of his former extreme views.

[Drake's Autobiography, MS., is useful for his early life, but disappointing for his political career. His views on the issues of the Civil War are in Union and Anti-Slavery Speeches (1864). His rise as a leader of the Missouri radicals is traced in the Missouri Democrat, 1863-71. A comprehensive account of that period is T. S. Barclay, Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 1865-1871 (1926).]

The Fortieth Congress of the United States: Historical and Biographical. Vol. 1., By William H. Barnes, 1869, p. 109.

CHARLES D. DRAKE. THE border States, upon the breaking out of the rebellion, were for a time the scene of severe conflicts between loyalty and treason; and during the whole progress of the war, only the presence of the military power of the Government secured the supremacy of the former. This condition of things brought out into prominence many men who had before taken little part in public affairs, and who did not enter the military service. Among these was Charles D. Drake, of Missouri. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on the 11th of April, 1811, being the son of Daniel Drake, M.D., of that city, for many years eminent as a practitioner and teacher of medicine.

Mr. Drake's education was mainly received in the ordinary schools of the West. The only institutions of a higher grade which he attended were St. Joseph College, Bardstown, Kentucky, and Captain Partridge's Military Academy, Middletown, Connecticut. While at the latter, in April, 1827, he was appointed a Midshipman in the Navy, and in the following November entered upon active duty, and remained in the Navy until January, 1830, when he retired from the service and began the study of the law. He was admitted to the Cincinnati bar in 1833, and the next year removed to St. Louis, then a town of seven thousand five hundred inhabitants. In 1838, he originated the St. Louis Law Library, now one of the most valuable in the country, and for more than twenty-one years was one of its Directors.

Mr. Drake's first appearance in public life was in 1859, when he was elected to the House of Representatives of Missouri, to fill a vacancy.

In 1860, he, for the first time since 1844, took part in politics, espousing the cause of Stephen A. Douglas for the Presidency, as a means of preventing the Electoral vote of Missouri from being cast for John C. Breckinridge. In August of that year, he delivered a speech at Victoria, in which the treasonable designs of the Southern States were exposed and denounced, and which, it was generally conceded, was the means of gaining the vote of Missouri for Mr. Douglas.

From the secession of South Carolina, Mr. Drake's course was open and pronounced against secession and rebellion. By speech and pen he labored for the Union cause, and it was in connection with those labors that he became prominent in Missouri and before the country.

In January, 1861, he delivered a speech in the Hall of Representatives of Missouri, in the presence of many members of the Legislature who were then plotting the secession of Missouri; in which he took the highest ground of unconditional loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.

On the following Fourth of July he delivered an elaborately prepared speech at Louisiana, Mo., upon all the issues of the hour; which was extensively published at the time, and was preserved in the “Rebellion Record.” The concluding words of this speech were as follows:

“We are lost if our Constitution is overthrown. Thenceforward we may bid farewell to liberty. Never were truer or greater words uttered by an American statesman, than when Daniel Webster closed his great speech in defense of the Constitution, nearly thirty years ago, with that sublime exclamation : ‘Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!' Union gave us liberty, disunion would take it away. He who strikes at the Union, strikes at the heart of the Nation. Shall not the Nation defend its life? And when the children of the Union come to its rescue, shall they be denounced? And if denounced, will they quail before the mere breath of the Union's foes ? For one, I shrink not from any words of man, save those which would justly impute to me disloyalty to the Union and the Constitution. My country is all to me; but it is no country without the Constitution which has exalted and glorified it. For the preservation of that Constitution I shall not cease to struggle; and my life-long prayer will be, GOD SAVE THE AMERICAN UNION !”

On the 22d of February, 1862, he delivered, in St. Louis, an Address, in which he denounced Slavery as the cause of the rebellion, and used these words:

“Let it once be manifest that we are shut up to choose between our noble country, with its priceless Constitution, and Slavery, then, with every fiber of my heart and every energy of my nature, I will pass along the universal cry of all patriots-Down with Slavery for ever! I would then no more hesitate which to choose, than, in view of death, I would balance between eternal life and eternal perdition.”

This Address was followed, at intervals, by others, during the progress of the rebellion, exposing its true character and aims, and denouncing Slavery as its sole cause. They were all gathered and published in a volume in 1864.

In 1863, Mr. Drake was elected a member, from St. Louis, of the Missouri State Convention, which was constituted in 1861, and which re-assembled in June, 1863, in pursuance of a proclamation of the Governor of the State, “ to consult and act upon the subject of the emancipation of slaves.” In that body he took ground in favor of immediate emancipation; but the Convention adopted a scheme so gradual as hardly to terminate Slavery before the year 1900. Mr. Drake, in a vigorous canvass, assailed it before the people; whence followed the rise of the “Radical” party in Missouri, of which he has for more than five years been the acknowledged leader.

In September, 1863, a delegation of seventy men from all parts of Missouri visited President Lincoln at Washington, to inform him of the actual condition of parties and affairs in Missouri. Mr. Drake was chairman of that body. Its address to the President attracted the attention of the people, and gave no inconsiderable impulse to Radicalism in all the loyal States. 

In February, 1864, a Freedom Convention was held in Louisville, Ky., which Mr. Drake attended, and which he addressed on Washing ton's Birth-day, in a speech which attracted much notice and commendation from all parts of the country. The following are the concluding words of that address :

“The issue, upon one side or the other, of which every man in the nation must be ranged, is fully made up, between that Radicalism which will venture all, do all, and brave all for the Union and Freedom, and that Conservatism which, assuming loyalty, hangs back from the advanced positions of patriotism; professes enmity to Slavery, and yet cringes to it; avows hostility to treason, and yet counts traitors for partisan ends; ever finds something strong and resolute, which it were wise not to venture—something prompt and effective, that had better not be done—something daring and aggressive, which it is discretion not to be brave; and is content to stake less than all for country, that it may more cheaply win all for itself. When between two such forces the country's safety hangs, it is time that the banner of Radicalism were unfurled beyond the narrow limits of Missouri. The nation should behold it. Why not raise it here? And why not on this birth-day of Washington! Is there any better place or day? We have come to fling it to the breeze, and to plant it in the front rank, and we will do it. It is no paltry ensign of sectionalism, no drabbled banner of party, but the grand old standard of the Republic, with every broad stripe still firm and unstained; and look! with one more star in its azure field, than when treason struck at the beaming constellation; and that one riven, with her own blood-stained hand, from once brilliant, now poor, dismembered, fallen Old Virginia !' And see ! its spreading folds reveal an inscription, inwoven in letters of gold, flashing in the orient sunlight! What are the words ? Read them, ye downcast and oppressed, for they speak hope and cheer to you; read them, friends of Freedom, for they tell you of a brighter day; read them, champions of Slavery, for they proclaim your discomfiture; read them, traitors, for they thunder anathemas to you, as they say—“The Union without a slave; the Constitution amended to forbid Slavery for ever; and the arms of the Nation to uphold that Union and that Constitution to the latest generation !'"

In November, 1864, a new convention was elected in Missouri, to revise and amend the constitution of that State, and Mr. Drake was chosen one of its members from St. Louis County, and upon its assembling, in January, 1865, was made its vice president, and soon became its acknowledged leader. By that body slavery in Missouri was abolished on the 11th of that month. The convention was in session three months, and formed the present constitution of that State. In its formation so large a part was taken by Mr. Drake that he became more prominently identified with it than any other member of that body.

Mr. Drake was elected to the Senate of the United States in January, 1867, and took his seat in that body on the ensuing 4th of March. In the subsequent consideration of the measures of reconstruction, he took a decidedly Radical stand; as, indeed, he had at all times taken on all questions relating to the suppression of the rebellion. His resolute adherence to Radical principles and policies was expressed in a published letter to Reverdy Johnson in November, 1867, in which he said:

“Here, Senator, at the close, as in the outset, we diverge. Cling, if you please, to purblind, droning, effete conservatism, and drift with it into the realms of the rejected and forgotten ; but I will hold on to living, clear-sighted, resolute, and progressive Radicalism, be its fate what it may. If Americans, in this the meridian of their military renown, have not courage, persistence, and nerve to uphold such Radicalism as upheld and saved their country in the day of its deadliest peril, they will only exhibit a dishonoring example of a people unsurpassed in martial valor and achievement, but too timid for great civil conflicts, too feeble for sharp moral exigencies, too fickle for earnest struggles for the right, and too small for the mold of a grand and noble destiny."

Participating in the discussion of the Supplementary Reconstruction bill in the Senate, Mr. Drake earnestly advocated the substitution of voting by ballot for the method which had prevailed throughout the South of voting viva voce, and said :

“Once get the mode of voting by ballot fairly into the hands of a majority of the people down there, and they will be very likely to take care of it; but what I want is, that while this nation is undertaking to reconstruct these States upon the principle of loyalty to the Union, upon the principle of protecting the loyal people, the work shall be done thoroughly. Sir, I came from a State where we have dealt with this rebellion in some of its foulest aspects; and we have learned there, through a long and bitter experience, that the only way to deal with it is to apply the knife deep and strong down to the very fibers of the roots, leave not a single atom in which to germinate a future rebellion. I came here, Sir—I do not hesitate to avow in open Senate on the first occasion when I have undertaken to address this august body, that I came here as a representative, not of a conservative radicalism, but of a radical radicalism, which believes in doing, and not in half doing.”

Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.